I’VE JUST BEEN TO TOKYO AND SEEN HOW GAMES CAN BE HELD SAFELY

I SpeNT the first six hours of my recent visit to Japan cocooned in a postage-stamp-size hotel room while I waited for a flight to Sapporo, where the Olympic marathon and race walk events will take place in July.

I had previously been to Tokyo last October to evaluate progress. On that occasion, it took an hour to navigate the Covid test and associated paperwork, once the plane had landed.

Last week, where I was attending the athletics test events, it took a tad under three hours. And once in the hotel, my team from World Athletics were confined in a bubble on a single floor, where we ate our meals in the room. Then came a further Covid test in the morning and only when negative results were returned could our duties begin.

We were only allowed out of the hotel to travel to the test events in the Olympic Stadium or on the roads to Sapporo.

This is how it will be when the Games take place.

We know already there will be no overseas visitors, sponsors will be few and far between and hospitality will be pared back or scrapped completely. Those working on the event from abroad, including the athletes and coaches, will remain hermetically sealed from local people.

This brings us to the biggest challenge, namely the mood of the host nation. As Abraham Lincoln once observed: ‘With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed.’

Yet the Games will most likely begin with a larger part of the population preferring to sit out the dance and that strain of public opinion has only hardened since my October visit.

The former politician in me says that we in the Games ecosystem need to show empathy to those communities who are nervous about an influx of athletes, coaches and support staff.

And I have to say that has not always been messaged as sympathetically as it might have been. In press conferences in Japan I was asked pretty much the same question: should the Games go ahead? My answer was an unequivocal ‘Yes’.

Yes, because I believe they can be delivered safely and securely for the local communities and the athletes. There is a big difference between last year and this: we know a great deal more about the pandemic (the Japanese have dealt with it so efficiently that their mortality figures are less than a tenth of those in the UK).

At a time when football, rugby, tennis and athletics are all back functioning, and crowds slowly returning, it would seem odd to pull stumps on an Olympic Games where the protocols will be tougher than in any other walk of life and many competitors and their support teams will be arriving having been vaccinated.

No sporting event of significance has proven to be a super-spreader. That is not to say we should be cavalier. But the world does need to keep moving, and the Games will bring optimism to the watching world and, crucially, to those competitors who have dedicated their young lives to set foot in an Olympic venue, three quarters of whom will never get the chance again.